suddenly he had the strength of 10 grinches plus two

I know, I know, I am totally lame.  My fount of ideas for blog posts has run dry.  I think of little things, and then think that's not enough for a whole post, and then forget about them anyway.  But I will try to dredge a few of them up and nooge them together.  I thought I made up that word, but I figured I better google it to make sure it didn't mean something, ummmm....., un-family-friendly, and sure enough, somebody's already taken it.  Nooge:  "A person who's so crazy hardly anyone can stand to be around them," according to the urban dictionary. 

OK, just shut up.

So, first off, the end of the three-years-in-the-waiting post about that Rick DeMarinis story, which didn't fit with the last post, but still might be interesting.  The story is about this nerdy guy Dave Colbert-- if I remember right, he's a high school English teacher-- who goes camping with people who are athletic outdoors types.  You start out sympathizing with him, but then at the end, he's nuts. 

The thing that bugged me was that I've been that person.  I live in outdoor recreational heaven, but I am a nerdy wimp.  I know exactly what it feels like to go on a weekend trip with a bunch of hiking buffs and be the one who has to get all the gently-condescending encouragement.  They are always very kind and very supportive (unlike the bullying athletic guy in the story), but I definitely don't fit in. 

Don't misunderstand.  I love being outdoors, and I love to hike.  But I don't feel the need to hike 20 miles in a single day, and plenty of people around here do.  Six or eight miles works just fine for me.  In fact, 2-3 will do it--my idea of a good camping trip is going on a two hour hike every day and spending the rest of the time sitting by the lake with a good book. 

This is going to turn into an entire post by itself.  ha.  Never underestimate my ability to go on and on. 

So, back to the DeMarinis story. I kind of took it personally when this guy turned out to be a nut, because he was the one I sympathized with.  About two pages in, one of the reasons I was hooked into the story was to find out how he handled it.  Would these uppity outdoors snobs get shown up somehow by the nerdy lit major?  (please, pretty please?)  Would he figure out a way to use his literary understanding to interpret the experience?  would he somehow be able to validate a thoughtful life? (as opposed to an active one)

But no, he just has a psychotic break, and the bullying hikers end up looking like civilized gems compared to his violent outbreak.  He ends up being the textbook example of an unreliable narrator--which is why we were reading it in a creative writing class-- because once you find out he's crazy, can you trust anything he's told you?  It's a great story, and it stimulated a great discussion in class, but it disappointed me.

What I realized as I thought about it though, is that one of the main reasons I read is to learn.  How would Colbert respond?  I wanted him to figure out a way to handle the situation so that I could figure it out, too.  Does everybody do this?  Do you read to learn?  Or is it a product of my upbringing, reading the Bible and all those Christian fiction books that were barely disguised morality tales?  (and oh, how I loved them anyway.  I still have my tattered copy of The Mystifying Twins.)

Of course, not always.  Sometimes I just read for fun.  I'm re-reading the Southern Sisters mystery novels right now as my fall-asleep books and they are purely for fun.  But I think when I read a more serious book, I expect to learn something.  that sounds really uptight and moral-ly, doesn't it.  But there it is.

the butler in the conservatory with the candlestick

In a podcast about fiction writing, one of the folks at Storywonk made the comment that genre fiction almost always resolves at the end.  The murderer is found, the bad guys are defeated, the hero marries the heroine--things are wrapped up.  Not necessarily a happy ending (there are plenty of mystery/suspense novels with endings that are sad or grim), but an ending. 

On the other hand, literary fiction tends to avoid resolution.  People who are proponents of literary fiction--and surprise! they are usually pretty down on genre fiction--insist that this is the way life is, so therefore literary fiction is more realistic and more complex.  There are no neat, tidy resolutions in real life, so why should there be in fiction?

[An aside, which is also an example.  I've been saving this story up for three years waiting for the time I could fit it in a post.]  When I took that creative writing class a few years ago, we read a story called "Wilderness," by Rick DeMarinis.  It's a great story, riveting and disturbing, with a distinctive narrative voice.  It's about a man named Dave Colbert, who goes on a camping trip with his wife and another couple.  He comes unglued and what starts as routine horseplay/bullying in a lake turns into violence.  Colbert is so enraged that he goes back to the campsite and picks up a hatchet.  The story ends as he is walking back to the lake with the hatchet in his hand.

This is classic literary fiction.  Several students in the class sagely nodded their heads and agreed that it was a great ending, because you don't know what happens and that's what real life is like.  Which was just nuts, if you ask me.  In real life, something would have happened.  Colbert would have walked down to the lake and hacked in the other guy's skull, or maybe he would have thrown down the hatchet, jumped in his car and driven back home.  Or he might have had a heart attack and died ten yards before the lake.  Or he might have been confronted by a bear and the hatchet in his hand saved his life.  Real life doesn't end as someone is walking down a path.  In real life, one of those things (or some other thing) would have happened, and none of the other ones.

This is why the "lack of resolution = real life" equation has never made much sense to me.  The ending to that story is perfect if DeMarinis' wanted to show that the anger that the story stirs up in the reader is part of the point (and it did make me very angry), so that your own enraged response becomes the determining factor in the story.  If that's what DeMarinis is doing, it doesn't matter what the main character does and the story ends in exactly the right place. 

But that's not the same thing as the story = "real life."  In fact, the whole point seemed to me to be that the story wasn't real life.  It is a carefully controlled tale-- DeMarinis picked a situation, a point of view, a starting point, and then he picked one of the four characters to serve as the focal point, and then he picked an end point.  It's entirely artificial. 

so what am I saying here?  excellent question because I'm not sure I know.  Try this:  maybe the only difference between the endings of genre fiction and literary fiction is that the author of literary fiction chooses to end his/her story before the story is over. 

Which begs the question: when is the story over?  In the fourth century when bards were spinning tales in mead halls (I totally made that up), stories had resolutions--the hero was killed in battle, the wanderer returned, the monster was vanquished, the kingdom was saved.  Or maybe the only way a story can be truly over is for everyone to die, like in Hamlet or MacBeth.  Both genre fiction and literary fiction are just snapshots, a moment in time.

So believe it or not, that whole thing was a setup so I could say something else about Gone Girl, which I discussed in my Reading Report last week.

***SPOILER ALERT*** I'm not giving away any major plot twists, but I do talk about what doesn't happen at the end, which is its own kind of spoiler.  Stop reading now if you haven't read it and think you might want to.

What Gone Girl does really well--brilliantly--is describe the breakdown of a marriage.  The slow downward spiral of resentment, bitterness, and hurt that come from petty grievances, missed moments of connection, disappointed expectations, and especially the self-centered blindness that leads you to resent your partner's lack of understanding of Who You Are, at the same time that you're ignoring who your partner is.  Flynn describes it all so precisely that if you've ever been in a difficult marriage (if you've ever been married?), it rings all too eerily true.

But the story is amped up because the Dunnes are beautiful people-- phenomenally physically attractive, and also they move in the right circles, have the right sense of humor, see the right films and read the right books.  They're both smart as hell, and that intelligence makes their dissection of each other even more laserlike than it might be with more average people.  Then you begin to realize that one of them is crazy (we'll say that's A, and the other one is B).  And by the end, both of them are crazy (although I suppose that's debatable).

So I'm reading along and I can already tell that there is no happy ending coming.  Even though there could have been-- it wouldn't have been that hard to write it so that B gets away from A and moves on to a more normal life-- you can tell by the way the arc of the story is going that there is not going to be any happiness for these two.  I figured that one of them would kill the other, or they would somehow both die, or maybe a murder-suicide.

But even that would have been resolution.  Flynn didn't choose to let her readers feel resolved.  She chose to end the story with the two of them locked in an endless, perfectly balanced stalemate, where neither of them can, or at least will, leave.  By this time A is so horrible, such a thoroughly despicable person, that the whole thing just turns your stomach.  B hasn't been a jewel, but nobody deserves that.  Yet in a weird way, they have become dependent on each other.

Or at least, that's what Flynn tells you.  I wasn't sure I bought it.  If difficult circumstances in your life change you and make you a more responsible, compassionate person, do you then have to stay in the difficult circumstances in order to continue to be responsible and compassionate?  Can't you move forward into new situations without losing what you've gained?  And anyway, people are not perfect.  The perfect stalemate that Flynn works so hard to set up can't last forever.  It would have come unbalanced at some point.

Geeze.  This has been a long, interminable post about nothing.  See?  this is why I don't read books like this very often (the last one was The Secret History back in the early 90s).  I can't get them out of my head and it makes me crazy.

for the writers among us

Since I know at least half a dozen of you are writers, I thought you might be interested in the discussion we had on the last day of one of my seminars last spring.  Yup, that's how long this post has been floating around in my head.  I was in the Literature program, but our English department also has a quite well-regarded MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program for creative writers. The MFA students have to take at least 3-4 literature courses during their program, so in almost every seminar I took, there were at least a few, and sometimes a bunch, of MFA students.

I loved having them in class because first of all, they're a talkative bunch, so they always generated lively discussion, and secondly, they often had different and interesting perspectives on what we were discussing because they focused less on literary theory and more on how the work was put together, how the author achieved certain effects.

So anyway, the very last day the professor opened up a free-for-all discussion about the state of fiction today.  In a graduate level classroom, this meant that we were going to discuss literary fiction.  No one had to say that.  Serious literary types do not read genre fiction.  MFA students are the ones that are learning to write literary fiction-- which means that they can be quite snobbish about genre fiction.  I see literary fiction as a genre, but not many do.

We had a discussion here about literary vs. genre fiction awhile back (try this one or this one if you're interested, and on that second one, read the comments).  So most of you know that I am a fan of genre fiction.  I love mysteries and science fiction and fantasy and romance novels.  In fact, literary fiction has become so dismally, drearily despairing (or so weird), that in the past couple of years, when I've wanted a break from my reading for school, I've read genre fiction.  So this is not intended to be a defense of literary fiction. I'm just reporting what they said.

Mostly the MFA students see literary fiction as "real" writing, while genre fiction is just about taking a set of genre conventions and coming up with a new version of them-- sort of like painting on blank canvas compared to paint-by-numbers.  (Genre conventions are the elements that always appear in a work of a particular genre.  In a mystery novel, there will always be a murder, and an investigator, and clues that include red herrings, and a denouement where all is revealed.  You can do some pretty creative things with that set of guidelines, but it's rare to read a mystery novel that doesn't use most of those conventions.)

So here are these kids, who have landed highly sought-after positions at a good MFA program (it was even in the Top 10 a few years ago), discussing the state of fiction today.  I was fascinated.  I was madly scribbling down notes.  The main thing I noted was the changing emphasis on why they write.  Twenty-five years ago, the last time I was in school, the argument for literary fiction would have included something along the lines of "art for art's sake," writing what was in your soul no matter what was popular, ignoring commercial success to stay true to Your Art.

But these kids want their work to be read.  It's not so much that they're after commercial success (although a few of them were unabashedly interested in making money), it was more that they wanted to write stuff that people would read.  "We're trained to write plotless stories," one of them said, "but that's not what people want to read."  (And also, that's not what gets published.)  "You can't ignore readability," another said-- which was a near astonishing assertion coming from someone in an MFA program.  MFA students write lean, spare, elegant prose that captures a particular moment in time.  "The moment after which nothing is the same," one of them described it during another discussion.  They do not worry about whether or not their work is readable.

But they also couldn't understand the attraction of genre fiction.  "In a typical thriller or suspense novel, the conflict is resolved by action," one of them noted.  "What's interesting about that?"  "Why would you want to write something where most of the decisions are made before you sit down to write?" said another (which almost made me laugh, knowing how some of you have struggled to write good, intelligent genre fiction).

It seemed to me that they were describing something of a crossroads in fiction writing-- a new willingness to consider fiction as something that a reader should enjoy reading.  (A willingness to consider the reader, period, I might cycnically add, something literary authors of the past have not really felt they needed to do.)  If they are typical of MFA students in other places, I suspect that literary fiction may be shaken up a bit in the next few years.  Probably few of them have ever read genre fiction, but I would love to hand them some of the books we've described as the good stuff and see what they would do with it.


So, not much else to say, just thought it might be food for thought for some of you.  There were surprisingly few authors they were willing to recommend-- Franzen was pretty universally admired, but all the other names that came up were disputed-- Froer, Eugenides, Paul Auster, A.S. Byatt, Lydia Davis, and Nick Flynn were mentioned.  And that was about it.